Faye

I met her on the eve of my twentieth birthday.

I sat at the counter at Denny's feeling what I now know is the beginning of a panic attack. I had walked the four miles from the tiny apartment I shared with a woman who had told me shortly before that we should stay roommates and discontinue our friendship.

It was my first break up.

I stared at my check stub already knowing a waitress's true payday was the wads of ones and the occasional five she pulled out of her apron pocket at the end of the night. A few crumpled bills and change represented the charged tips the manager placed in an old tackle box, the label bearing my name bright white over the yellowed tag of my predecessor.

Melissa had gone home to Washington and school with promises of moving to California after graduation. A long summer of listening to the oldies station while locking the world out had faded into the reality of fall. I couldn't stop crying.

I was homesick.

It had been three months since I'd been notified that I was a bad influence. A "bad association". I was counselled and prayed over. My questions were answered with, "God will provide if you have faith."

I had faith. But I also had my half of the rent and the natural desire to eat. The only job available to a nineteen-year-old girl with no experience was waitressing. And the low man on the totem pole got the graveyard shift.

That was my sin.

I worked nights.

I'd watched my roommate become friends with a married man, tell everyone they were merely brother and sister in faith. I witnessed her coming home in the wee pre-dawn hours, swearing they'd spent the night studying the Bible.

He had a key to our apartment.

I did not.

When I demanded one, I was locked out of her life as surely as I'd once been locked out of my home. And then the lectures began, the scoldings, the shaking heads and whispered gossip of what I must be doing while spending those long hours alone in a nearly deserted restaurant with no one but the bus boy and cook for company.

The door to Denny's opened behind me and the new hostess walked in. She was younger, vibrant and carefree. I saw in her a life that wasn't constrained by the chains of religion. She didn't struggle with the morality of befriending a gay co-worker or spending her evenings at work alone with two men. As Katrina was leaving, paycheck in hand, she walked over and said a few words. What they were, I can't remember. But I do remember what I said next. "What are you up to tonight?"

"Going to a movie."

"Can I come too?" It was a ballsy move only a nineteen-year-old could make. I was desperate for a friend, for connection. I was reeling from the loss of my religion and the realization that I wasn't sure if the world really was as I'd always thought it to be.

She paused and shrugged. "Sure." With a simple conversation a friendship of twenty years was formed. There were other people in the car that night, people who populated my twenties and were my daily companions. Some drifted. With others there were fights. But she stayed around.

It was after we drove to her house that I met Faye.

I think now that she must have been in her mid-forties. A salty old broad obsessed with Garfield and Dr. Pepper. She walked into the kitchen and eyed the new face. What did she see, I wonder. Did she see a lost stray who needed a soft place to land? Did she recognize the fear? The desperation to find a new place to belong, without worry of judgement?

Or did she simply see another kid at her kitchen table who she could feed and scold?

I've been thinking about Faye a lot lately, what she'd tell me now, how she'd react to the changes in my life. I wonder if now that I'm older, more settled, I'd sit with her on a lawn chair in her driveway to watch the neighborhood come to life - children riding bikes, adults wandering over with a glass of wine in hand. She didn't take any shit from anyone and there are things in my life I struggle with, battles I run from even though I know I can't run forever. I don't think she'd believe the lies I tell myself.

Dad came to visit me a year or so after I met her. They had a long talk and when he left to drive the nine hundred miles home, he hugged me tight and told me I'd be okay. He looked at Faye and said, "Take care of her." Faye nodded her head and took a drag on her cigarette. It was a request that didn't need to be asked. As my sisters joined me one by one, she looked after all of us, folding us into her flock. She laughed at our first hangovers before buying us a greasy breakfast. She handed me her granddaughter moments after birth, our eyes filled with tears of joy. She made sure I was never without a hammer or screwdriver and gave me a Look when I didn't fix my own flat tire. She taught me to make cheesecake, yelled at mechanics who tried to take advantage of me, and called me hers.

She's been gone ten years.

Lung cancer.

Ugly words for a beautiful person.

I'm in the same decade she was when I met her and I wonder if one day Joseph or Elizabeth will bring home someone shaken, not quite certain of their place in the world. I hope I have the grace and wisdom to take that friend under my wing and be half the woman Faye was.